Jonathan Franzen says Twitter is 'unspeakably irritating'

People on Twitter have responded to the American novelist Jonathan Franzen's
remark by launching a campaign ridiculing his dismissive comments.

Photo: Finn Beales 2012

By Telegraph staff

6:21PM GMT 07 Mar 2012

The notoriously luddite author of Freedom and The Corrections launched his tirade against the social networking site at a talk in Tulane, New Orleans on Sunday night.

“Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis," said Franzen.

"Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium … People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.”

The comments were recorded in a blog by the author Jami Attenberg. It did not take long for Tweeters to take revenge by setting up the hashtag #JonathanFranzenHates.

Hundreds of people on the site have picked up on the hashtag, which has been rolling profanity about the curmudgeonly author since Monday. Suggestions veer from "your mom" and "egg yolks", to:

Franzen famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing. His novel 'Freedom', however, has its own Twitter account with 1,692 followers - not quite as impressive as Franzen's satirical Twitter writer, Emperor Franzen who is also followed by Penguin Books USA.

Speaking at the Hay Festivalin Colombia in January, Franzen argued that e-books, such as Amazon’s Kindle, can never have the magic of the printed page.

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen.

In 2009 the invention of the term ‘Franzenfreude’ was coined by author Jennifer Weiner to describe “taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen”.